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“... of the three centuries which followed. It is therefore surprising that, before the translation of Burckhardt’s essay, Das Altarbild, there was no book in English tracing the origins and early evolution of this art form, and describing its purpose. Burckhardt’s essay, which deals only with Italy, was written in ...”

“... built, railways altered the way millions of men and women experienced time and space: the train, Jacob Burckhardt wrote in 1840, ‘glides in 33 or 35 minutes to … distant Potsdam … It really flies there like a bird.’ They also greatly enhanced the ability of governments to project power, allowing them to penetrate their territories and control ...”

“... we must be grateful to scholars who have done it well. Two names spring at once to mind: those of Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, written in 1860, is still required reading on its subject; and Johan Huizinga, who wrote in Burckhardt’s shadow about the same centuries (though not the ...”

“... Theodor Mommsen, Julius Beloch, Eduard Meyer and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, alleging that Burckhardt had written a non-existent book – ‘incapable of saying anything either of Greek religion or of the Greek state which deserves a hearing’ – on a non-existent subject: ‘The Greece of Burckhardt no more exists ...”

“... argument or example, and not always reasonable. Two of Wilamowitz’s chief butts, Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, are not even mentioned, though his early assaults on them were genuine scandals and were never retracted. What I have concentrated on is the far more important matter, as I indicated at the outset, of the place of Classical studies in our ...”

“... who have contributed to this volume could muster – with the sort of irony that speaks from Jacob Burckhardt’s letter of February 1874: ‘In thanking you very warmly, and having merely rushed through this immensely significant essay, I can only say a word or two in reply ... Above all, my wretched head has never been capable of reflecting even ...”

“... images across what remained a dangerous and divided countryside. Like his most admired forerunner, Jacob Burckhardt, Hale insists that the Renaissance cannot be reduced to the Classical revival that nourished it; but he supports this thesis with a range of evidence that goes against Burckhardt’s belief in a unified ...”

“... of faith in the zeitgeist has been to reject the kind of portrait of an age painted so vividly by Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga and to retreat into monographs on limited topics. An exciting feature of Greenblatt’s book, made most explicit in his introductory essay, is that he offers a way of putting an age, or culture, together again. His own ...”

“... surface of historical debate. As for the concept of the Renaissance itself, to which, as we know, Jacob Burckhardt gave such lustre, here is Hexter in 1951 wondering whether it would survive much longer the irreverent scepticism he himself professed for it. Well, yes, it has survived, unhappily for Hexter, and not only, as our author claims, because of ...”

“... its own terms and even, where possible, to enjoy it. The portraits in hall – the Swiss Victorian Jacob Burckhardt, Leopold Ranke, the German father of scientific history – look down approvingly. Magnificently expressed, we have Burrow’s admonition that ‘we can avoid ... writing as though we told the story ... The shield of Aeneas foretold the ...”

“... centuries’ worth of dust. Inexplicably, Leroi’s sole source is an 1872 history of Greece by Jacob Burckhardt, a fierce Swiss contrarian who detested Athenian democracy and glorified aristocracies (and Sparta). Leroi also misses the opportunity to illuminate a lost chapter in the history of science. Some of the first inklings of the ...”

“... on The Footnote, Anthony Grafton quotes a letter by the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reporting that he had just cut up his notes on Vasari’s Lives into 700 little slips and rearranged them to be glued into a book, organised by topic.From this practice of making notes on separate slips of paper there emerged what became ...”

“... wealth. This is not, I think, what voters in Sunderland and Cornwall voted for. Enthusiasts like Jacob Rees-Mogg compare Brexit to the repeal of the Corn Laws. They tend not to dwell on the terrible agricultural depression that set in after the American railways and steamships started bringing corn from the Midwest into the country in the 1870s. Thousands of ...”

“... to explain cultural change, it is partly because he couldn’t escape the shadow of another book: Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). While Braudel devoted his life to a ‘science of history’, Burckhardt practised history as portraiture, taking an era as his subject. Often ...”